Allocator2008

That said, he does make some good point on this particular issue about minor's rights. Maybe lower the voting age to 16? Like if you are old enough to drive, you are old enough to vote. Of course this would be good for the GOP since children engaged enough to vote at that age would often be copying their parents, who could be Rush Limbaugh "ditto-heads" or the like. Nevertheless, I would be open to allowing the voting age to be 16.

Still though it is astounding to me that people who think time is a fundamental property are taken seriously in academia. That is sooo 19th century. I really don't have the time for such folks.

Compared to say, Sophocles of old, or, in our time, people like Harold Pinter or Edward Albee, Shakespeare was a hack pulp fiction paperback play write who wrote a small number of adequate plays and a large number of really poor plays. Even his best, 'Hamlet', was itself meandering and hard to decipher - Hamlet is crazy, but one thinks he is just pretending to be crazy, however, after a few viewings (or readings) one figures out he is actually in point of fact crazy (insane). But this point could have been made with more clarity and brevity which is why although the play is a great play, we cannot call its author a particularly great writer - good, to be sure, but not great, again, not compared to the really great ones of our day like Pinter.

The real tragedy is that high school students are forced to suffer through this hack's tortuous and obfuscated attempts at drama and pathos. Now that is a tragedy.

When you get right down to it, it is basically saying the wave functions of the entangled photons do not decay since they are never directly observed. Extrapolating from this one can say that in fact Wheeler and Everett were right, and the wave function never decays at all. Which of course leads to the "branching universe" idea, which to me will one day be seen as no more surprising than the "many galaxies" idea. Remember, the idea of other galaxies before the discoveries of Hubble and so on used to be only speculation, not universally held. Now we know there are at least 10^10 galaxies. Similarly the fact that the wave function never collapses, as Everett and Wheeler proposed will be held to be just as prosaic as the fact that there are other galaxies.

Let me just say this: the neuron is a black box. So confidant I am of this, I would be happy to volunteer for the experiment where each neuron in my brain was one by one replaced with an artificial replica.

I am serious. Call MIT, get Marvin Minsky on board, and I'm game. We can do it in Austin where I live, in Palo Alto, or at MIT. I don't care. It would just be nice to shut these anti-AI nutcases up once and for all. :-)

Fred Hoyle might have been "wrong" about steady state theory, in that the standard big bang model seems to match observation better, but it was a damn cool model in its hey day nevertheless, and Hoyle is rightfully remembered for that.

So I think it is not so much about being right or wrong or winning or losing but more just attempting. History recalls those who attempt and then fail or are proved wrong. History will not recall those who never even try great things.

The man is a criminal. He copy/pastes UNIX code, renames it to LINUX, and styles himself as the purveyor of a "new" operating system.

SCO Group should get all this criminal's assets forthwith, and Torvalds himself should be locked away in GITMO with all the other Soviet spies. This man is a greater threat to American free enterprise than his heroes Lenin and Trotsky. Instead of congratulating this commie, we should lock him and his "comrades" up for the protection of our country, and re-direct his ill-gotten gain back to SCO Group, where it belongs.

It is the Howard Roarkes and Steve Jobs of the world that drive the economy. Were Ms. Rand around today, she would surely see Mr. Jobs as a Howard Roarke of today. For the sake of Apple's shareholders, I hope they can find somebody else similar in the event that Mr. Jobs cannot return.

He posits that mind vs. world dualism is mistaken because I can for example map addresses on my iPhone, thereby allowing me to store memories of different locations in my iPhone instead of my brain, therefore the iPhone is part of my "mind", therefore separating mind from external world is mistaken.

I think there is truth here, but I would go further - that just as in a LAN many terminals can access the same file, and therefore the separation between terminals is fuzzy, so too "mind" is a fuzzy concept much as "terminal" is a fuzzy concept in a LAN. Where does one terminal end and the next begin? Where does one "mind" begin and the next end?

Maybe instead of attacking mind vs. external world dualism we need to re-evaluate mind. To me it is perfectly valid to say the brain can "out source" certain tasks, like storing locations in an iPhone, and therefore the line between "outside world" and "inside world" gets blurred. But instead of saying my iPhone is part of my "mind", let's say the iPhone gets read and written to by the threads of my brain. Let's look at the iPhone not as "part of mind" but as an external hard drive written to and read from by the threads of my brain. At the end, there is no "mind" as an irreducible entity. There is only a multi-threaded neural network application in the wetware of a naked ape lately out of Africa.

The real dualism to attack is not "mind" vs. "outside world" but "brain" vs. "mind". There is no "mind" per ce in my opinion. What we call "mind" are the threads running in the brain, nothing more or less.

In simpler terms, the trade off here is that if you want to end aging, you also have to end sex. Christians would love that, I know, but the rest of us might have some qualms about that.

I LOVE THIS [PLATFORM]!"

Regarding 1), I would be certainly interested in what X can be shown to be true within Objectivism such that its establishment would undermine the system or cause a contradiction. As it is based on the Law of Identity I think one would be hard pressed to find an X that poses a problem, but hey, I'm all ears! :-)

Regarding the bridge between what-is --> what-ought. Certainly a hard problem prima facia. I'm not a trained philosopher, but I would say that, starting with "(A) != (!A)", one can say A "ought" to do action x if x preserves or enhances A's identity, that is to say, A's existence. So a black hole "ought" to accrete matter, because that is what black holes do, and accreting matter preserves and enhances the black hole's identity as a black hole, that is to say, it's existence, since, for Rand, identity is tantamount to existence. So man "ought" to be selfish because man IS by identity a selfish being. Acting selfishly preserves an individual's identity as a selfish being, i.e., preserves that individual's very existence. To "live for others" is to lose one's identity, and by declension, one's existence. "What-ought" it seems to me can have no meaning apart from the preservation of its subject or its actor. I "ought" to do that which preserves my genes, just like a black hole "ought" to accrue matter. There is no "ought" it seems to me divorced from preservation of existence, or preservation of identity. Thus:

1) Man is by identity selfish. 2) Man does not exist without his identity. 3) Man does not exist outside being selfish. 4) There is not "what-ought" beyond "what is needed to preserve existence of the actor, for all other meanings are subjective. 5) Man ought to preserve his existence. 6) By 2) existence is identity, so man "ought" to be selfish.

Admittedly a tough one, but that is my "stab" at it for the moment, ha!

Again, I would be interested in what X could be proved true within Objectivism such that Objectivism becomes inconsistent. :-)

"She held that objective identification of the values of attributes of existents is obtained by measurement, broadly defined as procedures whose perceptual component, the comparison of the attribute's value to a standard, is so simple that an error in the resulting identification is not possible given a focused mind."

Regarding skepticism:

Hyper-bolic skepticism is self-defeating in that if you go around saying nothing can be established then neither you (your own existence) or the statements you are making can be established either. It is right up there with solipsism, i.e., it deserves no serious consideration. Nobody acts on a basis of solipsism or hyperbolic skepticism.

BULLSHIT.

This is right up there with the people who thought that we could never travel at speeds of 40 MPH or above because then we would suffocate.

Psuedo-science at its best (or worst).

Teachers who can't teach blame facebook. Well maybe they should find another occupation instead of blaming technology. Incompetent teachers and parents want to blame social networking. Eat shit and die is all I can say.

Objectivist epistemology is the only epistemology that is worth a shit to me, i.e., in that any attempt to refute it necessarily ends up pre-supposing one of its precepts, ergo, it cannot be refuted, ergo, it is the only epistemology to bother with.

Cells, animals, apes, including that ridiculous naked ape who calls himself Man, are nothing more than gene carrying robots, carrying around junk DNA from all antiquity into an uncertain future. The human eye is one of the most inefficient mechanisms ever produced (compared with say, a fly's eye). An engineer who designed that would be fired.

If evolution by natural selection operating on the level of the selfish gene is not true, then you are left with one of the laziest, most incompetent engineers ever imagined, and this bumbling nincompoop is supposed to be operating on a geological and cosmic scale. We are either gene carrying robots as Dawkins and others have proved time and again, or we are puppets created by the most incompetent designer ever conceived.

Oh, and by the way, your incompetent designer theory still begs the question of whence the designer? It is the ultimate 747 in the junkyard, and so we have an infinite regress of "intelligent designers", each presumably even more incompetent than the last.

How tripe like this gets onto a technology forum boggles the imagination. Must we also give equal time to the Flat Earth Society and to Pastafarians? I'll retire to bedlam.